


He Told Me Enough

by Ma_Kir



Category: Star Wars, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Ahch-To, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, Gen, Mirror Cave, Revelations, Tragedy
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-01
Updated: 2019-08-01
Packaged: 2020-07-27 17:20:19
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,446
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20049715
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ma_Kir/pseuds/Ma_Kir
Summary: Kylo Ren discovers the truth about a Force-sensitive, about a Skywalker.But it isn't Rey.





	He Told Me Enough

It's anticlimactic, all things considered, in the grand scheme of things. All that work to get the Map and in the end, it didn't even matter. 

Ahch-To. It is a planet in the Outer Rim, a world covered with a vast body of water, with scattered rocky archipelagos, and rugged terrestrial vegetation. But Kylo Ren knows better now. The Supreme Leader of the First Order, and master of the Knights of Ren, recalls the oceans that has never seen, the spray of the water he had never personally felt. He even recalls the mottled forms of the Lanai in their distant villages, and the invasive species known as Porgs that like to tangle themselves into anything they can find. 

And the ruins. Especially the ruins.

Kylo Ren exits his ship, his cloak fluttering behind him, as he walks across the ramp into the gravel, into the grey soil where the Jedi Master Luke Skywalker spent his last days. Past collapsed pillars, and crumbling architecture -- much of it pre-Hyperspace era, from his own estimation -- Kylo Ren comes to another familiar sight. There is a hut, or what is left of it. A powerful force had impacted into it, bursting through the entire structure. For a few moments, he recalls the scene: his phantasmal hand almost touching hers ... right before Force push that exploded through the wall, revealing the anger and fear-filled face of his uncle. It had just been an instant. 

Just like that instant where a young boy, afraid for his life, had summoned his lightsaber cylinder into his hand, igniting its azure blade against its emerald opposite, as he collapsed the ceiling on the both of them ...

But what truly gets Kylo Ren's attention, in the here and now, is the hollowed out tree. 

It is a Uneti tree. He knows this, because his uncle showed him a younger one on Yavin Four: a cutting taken from an Imperial research facility that had, in turn, taken in the remnants of the Great Tree from the Jedi Temple on Coruscant: before the Emperor had turned the entire area into the Imperial Palace. He recalls it, even now, radiating an awareness, a strength in the Force. It hadn't been sentient, as far as lifeforms had gone, but it had somehow reached out to him and his uncle. Just being in its presence had made him feel closer to the ecosystem of that entire world and all the plant and wildlife around them. It had almost made him feel connected to something else: something greater than himself. 

This Uneti tree, however, had been dead for a long time, yet all but shaped into a building: a small temple in its own right, or a shrine. Kylo Ren can still sense the remnants of its life force in the ground. Something powerful, a lightning bolt, had struck the ancient remnants of this Great Tree, leaving just ashes, soot, and tattered grey bark. Whatever had been in this ancient tree, was long gone now. Kylo Ren's boots crunch across the ground as he continues searching, knowing that he doesn't need the Force to realize that there is nothing for him there now, if there ever really was.

He walks towards a crude building made of rock. It takes him a moment. There is something elemental about the design, roughly honed and also falling apart, but it is practically the grandparent of the Temple where Skywalker attempted to begin training his next generation of Knights. It is smaller, though, and far less complicated. Kylo suspects that this particular Temple would take far less time to burn. 

Still, he goes inside. There is an echo, or a series of echoes through the Force. Some of them are from the Caretakers, and even the vestiges of older resonances: monks and priests ... the ones that would one day become Jedi. It occurs to him that it all began here. Just as the Uneti tree had been taken from Ossus to Coruscant, the Jedi Order had been taken from this small world to spread throughout the Galaxy. And just like the remnants of the tree he passed, for all it is dead, the roots still remain in everything: in galactic culture, and folklore. And rebellion. 

He feels the nova of ... _her_ presence here, even after all this time as well.

And Luke's.

Even on Crait, fighting that manifestation of him, that projection -- even as withered as he had truly become -- Luke Skywalker's aura still held tremendous presence. It is not something that someone easily forgot. For just as his uncle had laboured under the grand shadow of his grandfather, so too did Kylo -- at one time -- dwell under the shade of Luke Skywalker: the looming shape that spread across the entire Galaxy larger than reason or logic. Larger than life itself.

And now, as Kylo Ren stares down at the disc of the Prime Jedi rendered in staccato patterns, he realizes that this presence is now stronger than ever. 

It is at that moment, that he feels ... _it_ call to him. 

The Dark Side of the Force thrums, hissing, bubbling. It sounds like the dragon that he has been chasing for over a decade now inside himself. In Snoke, it had loomed ancient and rumbling over him. In his Grandfather's shattered helmet it had whispered, faintly, of lost time and thwarted ambitions, of dissolution. But here, it is one of the places both Skywalker and Snoke had talked about in their respective lessons. A locus, or a vergence. 

It is calling him, muffled but near. 

Kylo Ren leaves the Temple. He travels across the gravel and stone until it becomes grass. It takes some time, but the muffled resonance becomes clearer, though he still can't quite make it out. It isn't focused like that of his old Master, or a distant echo like the presence of his long departed Grandfather. Not even the ancient Sith artifacts he'd come across, or ordered his Knights of Ren to retrieve came close to this feeling. It is alive, he can feel it, but it is more like he is answering its call and it replies to something that is already inside of him. Whereas the Light, even after all this time, continues to talk to him, a glimmer at the corners of his figurative vision, the Dark murmurs louder, rustling through his anger, and resentment -- his frustration -- like a serpent. Like ...

And then, he comes to it. Finally.

The vegetation is thicker here. But it is vines, thick black vines, covering a hole into some kind of tunnel. The smell of water is stronger here, saltier, but with a greater scent of brine. Yes, Kylo definitely recalls this lesson. There had been a Cave on Dagobah, underneath an old and rotten tree, a test that Luke had been given by the Jedi Master Yoda. It had been a trial that he had failed. 

But Kylo Ren isn't Luke Skywalker. He is not ignorant. He had gone into that same Cave under Snoke's instruction. And he obliterated it. That place hadn't defeated him. And neither will this one. He knows the lightsaber on his belt won't help him. But he takes it with him anyway. _This lightsaber is your life_, a voice says from a long time ago, from a line of warrior monks dead and gone. Still, Kylo takes off his cloak, shrugging the hood and cape off his shoulders. He keeps his helmet on, however, his personal relic painstakingly pieced back together, reclaimed after his rebuke from his now long-dead Master: made his own again. It is part of who he is now. It is who he is now. There is nothing left for Kylo Ren but power. And the knowledge that this place offers him is just another form of it: another way of figuring out what Luke Skywalker had been doing this past decade in exile, and how Rey figured into all of this. But, more importantly, it is just one more trial for Kylo Ren to achieve his own destiny: to know what he must do next. 

Kylo Ren calls upon the Force, letting it rage through him, as he jumps and plunges through the hole in the ground.

It feels like he is falling forever. 

A cold, encompassing body of liquid surrounds his body, murky and frigid. Through the visor of his helmet, he sees the remnants of animals, predators and prey alike, layers upon layers of the dead rotting, made bone, or sloughed into ever-descending sediment. Kylo Ren calls on the power of the Force, of the Dark Side, of the dragon that he now knows to be aquatic here, letting it slither coolly through his veins before buoying himself up to the surface ...  
  
His uniform feels sodden against his skin as the air whips about his body and he leaps out of the water. Then, he plunges down and lands on bended knees at the rocky shore. Kylo Ren spares a few moments to look back. He had been in more than just a pool, but an entire subterranean lake. And while he respects the power of this place, he refuses to let it consume him. That is something that only the weak allow to happen to themselves, and he has gone through far too much, done far too many things, to allow himself to ever be weak again.

Still, the Dark Side calls him, but it is a fulcrum for the Force itself. The master of the Knights of Ren walks away from the lake, even as the energy of this place suffuses him, and follows the trailing presence calling him to the end of the cavern. And when he sees it, he knows that this is what he has been looking for: or what has been looking for him. 

At first, it seems like a dead-end, just a wall of rock. But upon closer inspection, appearances are deceiving. It's his breath, chilled and frost, spreading across the reflective surface that catches his eye. He also realizes that the wall is cracked: its smooth glass marred by a multifaceted series of spider-webbed fractures. They remind him of the different Hyperspace lanes, a multitude of possibilities in space and time, and paths that led to different destinations: some straight and narrow, and others zigzagged and crooked until they vanish past the margins of the dark. It makes Kylo Ren recollect the Shatterpoint technique: an ability that allowed one to see a vergence that could and would change the inevitable fate of a particular event. 

It also reminds him of a discoloured version of his own kyber crystal. 

And so, the Supreme Leader of the First Order and the master of the Knights of Ren, the heir of Darth Vader, and the ruler of the Galaxy places one black-gloved hand, still moist with cold water, flat palm first in the centre of one of the cracks. 

Then, he is in the reflective surface. Somehow, he is in the shattered mirror. It reminds him of a black and white kaleidoscope, a malfunctioning holoprojection, turned into varying shades of grey. He focuses on the Force as it continues to whisper to him, as he attempts to observe the fractured webs, the fragments around him. He calls on the triumph of igniting his ancestral lightsaber through his old Master's body, the passion of fighting alongside the scavenger girl who is still inexorably linked to his essence, the fury of being cheated out of his vengeance on Luke Skywalker for keeping him back and trying to assassinate him in his sleep so many years ago, and the hollowness, the emptiness he felt as the pair of golden dice dissipated out of the palm of his hand on Crait much like the waning life force of his father as he stabbed him through the gut with his own crackling red lightsaber blade. 

It's faint. One fragment floats near him. He sees two shapes. It's as though the glass is barely translucent but he recognizes his uncle. Luke is there. He is at the Jedi Temple he destroyed a decade ago. The Jedi Master is sparring with someone. It is a slimmer, shorter shape. A woman's. She is holding a lightsaber. Another fragment passes over the first. Kylo Ren squints his physical and metaphysical gaze at Luke, and another form -- the woman again -- but she is on her knees in front of him. He is taking his lightsaber blade. A part of Kylo Ren wants to flinch, but instead of striking her the blade glows from one shoulder to the other. There are others nearby. Everyone is blurred in this scene, in this shimmering image, but he recognizes the uniforms of other Padawans, other students, similar to the garb that he used to wear. There aren't many of them. He thinks he sees his mother and father, and Chewbacca with the droids also watching this ceremony for what it is. 

Then another scene. Kylo Ren sees Luke and the woman together. They walk closer to each other, and they embrace. There are many more events, a series of them that take place almost simultaneously. It makes to Kylo Ren that Luke had managed to train at least one student. And ... while he never heard about his uncle's private life, he knew from his father that Luke had never been celibate, at least not during the days of the Rebellion. S_o, the title of Master wasn't just because you were the only Jedi left_, Kylo Ren thinks to himself as he concentrates, as he asks the Force what is so important about all of this: about what was worth his while here.   
  
All Kylo Ren sees next, when he manages to look around him and see another suspended panel, a broken portal to the past in the air, is a lightsaber and a blaster bolt. And Luke kneeling at a series of stacked stones. It takes Kylo a while to realize that it is a grave. Luke's head is bowed, barely seen from under the hood of his Jedi cloak. The aura of grief and remorse is palpable. 

There is also a bundle in his arms. He seems to be saying something. Kylo can read his lips through his beard. It resembles an apology. 

Another fragment looms over the Knight of Ren's head. He has never seen these figures before. It takes him longer, but he sees two suns and a desert world. A man in Jedi robes, or desert garb hands a man and a woman a bundle similar to the one that Luke had held. He is also bearded, but younger. The couple take the bundle, and the hooded man wanders away.

_Ben ..._ Kylo Ren hears from the past, his uncle's voice, but younger and full of another pain from a colder place. 

Kylo Ren witnesses a woman and a man. But they are different, but so familiar. It's his mother. It's his own mother and father. He knows them. As much as he has tried to forget, or change their memories into something bitter and twisted to fuel his power, they are still prevalent. His uncle is there. Luke is watching them as they play with a child, a baby with dark, curly hair. There is a strange, sad smile on his face. It's wistful. He keeps his distance. Kylo recalls that his uncle always, to some extent, kept his distance: both physically and emotionally. 

His father tries to pass the child to Luke, with his mother at his side, but Luke wards them away. And he leaves. 

Kylo observes a squat creature in Jedi robes making a demonstration as children with helmets over their eyes, and small lightsaber blades duel against training remotes. There is an image of a small, sandy blond-haired boy leaving a careworn woman for a tall man in a Jedi cloak, followed by another blond-haired boy surrounded by the couple on the desert world he'd seen from earlier on in the viewing fragments. The children and the boy with the Jedi didn't have normal leaves, something tells Kylo. But the boy with the couple on the world with two suns seemed happier. More grounded. Then, it transitions to his uncle in front of a group of Initiates and Padawans performing the same exercises. It feels like an eternity and another lifetime watching them train. Something annoys Kylo Ren about this. Perhaps it's recalling his own aborted training, and the subsequent rejection and murder attempt that came.   
  
As if on cue, he sees himself fighting with his parents. And his parents arguing with each other. He is just a boy here. They point at him when they think he doesn't see them, and he doesn't understand everything. Kylo remembers this. This was ... the incident. There had been a few others, of course. But this was the day when the _real_ incident happened. 

_"Your father wanted you have this when you were older ..."_ Another, older voice intones from another time, to another person. 

There is that face again. Luke's face. The night he loomed over him in the hut with his ignited blade. But there is not just anger or fear there, the very things he had abjured against so adamantly in his lectures. There is a despair in those blue eyes, and a deep sense of sorrow. It is bottomless. 

He doesn't understand. Kylo Ren doesn't understand this disparity between the Jedi Master's actions and his feelings. 

The air seems to crackle around him with his rising anger. He sees his uncle standing over him in his bed, his lightsaber ignited. And then, he sees his uncle standing over a dark armoured figure with his hand cut off -- his Grandfather -- while holding up a hand. Warding him off. Pleading. And then, that young black-clothed version of Luke is gone. And there is a robed figure igniting a lightsaber blade over a group of children dressed in Jedi garb in a council chamber. 

The scenes move faster, flitting more quickly like a hologram being sliced, a code-breaker hijacking the frequency and revealing all the binary symbols underneath the photons. It is unbearable. 

The figure of a diminutive Jedi Master teaching that group of younglings. Skywalker standing in front of his initiates attempting to build his own Jedi Order. The couple with the blond child who aged, slowly, under the twin suns on a moisture farm. A young man looking off to the distance, towards those suns. His own mother and father holding that bundle as Luke walks away, drawing the hood over his face, the sadness in his sister's face as his father's arms surrounds both his mother's shoulders and the bundle. Kylo's rages. His powers manifesting, and the two of them not knowing what to do until they called his uncle. His uncle.  
  
Dark hair. Dark hair ... 

All the times that Luke watched him train. All the times he failed to talk to him. All the times he had been about to try -- that damnable word _try_ \-- to reach out to him. To touch him. Even then, those blue eyes were full of regret. 

The same eyes as the scarred, old man in destroyed black armour looking up at Luke as he dies in his arms. And brown eyes. Dark brown eyes from a woman with a distended belly coming up to a robed, blond-haired man on a fiery planet. And brown eyes on that same woman with a worn face dying in the arms of that same young man in shorter hair, in a hut, in the middle of nowhere. 

He had always thought he'd gotten his hair and his eyes from his mother. From his father. 

Kylo Ren grits his teeth. The refracted images are blindingly fast but his power allows him to see them all in a faded sepia. Then ... 

Then ...

_"No. I am your --"_

A black-gloved hand reaches out. And then, the fragments, the split images, the impressions, they are all gone. 

Kylo Ren is back on Crait. But the Walkers aren't behind him anymore. Neither is his shuttle. His troops are gone as well. All of them are back with the First Order. Even his Knights of Ren aren't here, just as they hadn't been the first time, left behind to make sure that Hux obeyed his orders and ordered to eliminate him or anyone else that dared defy his absolute authority. But the Resistance isn't here this time either. There are no crashed ships. No fleeing pilots and soldiers. There is no Rey. Not even Leia Organa can be felt through the Force. 

It's just him. Him and Luke Skywalker. The man stands there, looking as he had a decade ago. However, this time he isn't wielding a blue lightsaber that doesn't exist. It's emerald. And Kylo isn't even holding his cross-guard lightsaber this time. Somewhere, some part of him knew there was now no longer any point. Luke deactivates the emitter on his lightsaber cylinder with a reverse _snap-hiss. _He begins to walk forward. Somehow, even knowing he isn't real, that he was always just a man, he still looms larger than life over him. Kylo Ren is tall now, taller than the older man, but he always felt like a little boy compared to him. Compared to a legend. He looked up to him. He wanted to be just like him. 

Luke is inches away from now. He reaches out one hand. Not his black-gloved prosthetic, but his flesh and blood hand: one calloused and weathered by moisture farming, making constant repairs on broken equipment, gripping a control stick, and wielding a lightsaber. It barely occurs to Kylo that his mask is gone as Luke's hand touches his face, caressing the scarred part of it, the very same spot Rey slashed with his old lightsaber, the very place Han Solo touched before he fell -- impaled -- to his final adventure. 

And then, he sees them again.   
  
He sees Luke Skywalker chopping off Darth Vader's hand on the Second Death Star. He sees Darth Vader cutting off Luke Skywalker's hand at Bespin. He sees Obi-Wan Kenobi eviscerating Anakin Skywalker on Mustafar, and leaving him to burn. He sees Anakin Skywalker leave his mother and be raised by Obi-Wan Kenobi at the Jedi Temple. He sees Luke Skywalker smiling with his aunt and uncle as a child, oblivious to the fate that awaited him. He sees Darth Vader cut Obi-Wan Kenobi down on the Second Death Star, leaving only empty robes in his wake. He sees Anakin Skywalker holding his dying mother. He sees Luke Skywalker holding Anakin Skywalker as the older man smiles sadly up at him, closing his eyes and dying. He sees Leia hold him at night. He sees himself in the Falcon with Han and Chewie. And Luke, Luke always watching from a distance, even when he was right nearby. When he was always there.   
  
_"I failed you, Ben."_ Luke says again, withdrawing his hand, his eyes sad, his words bringing them back to this faded purity, this purgatory in Crait. 

Then he fades away, as if he had never been there, his empty cloak fluttering in the wind.

_I'm sorry ..._

Then, Kylo Ren is left there, standing in front of the reflective wall in the grotto. Alone again. 

It takes some time for it all to sink in, for the heaviness in his core, sitting like a dead weight, to rise up. Slowly, with a deceptive gentleness, Kylo takes off his helmet. He places it down, on the ground, in black lichen and looks up again. His scarred face, still impossibly young and pale, looks back at him: distorted by the cracks in the facade of the stone. There is a distant rumble in the background of his mind. He realizes that it is blood, the blood roaring in his ears. He sees it now. He sees it all, written there, in his face. The truth: hidden in plain sight.   
  
Just like naming a young boy Skywalker on the planet of his Dark Lord father's birth. 

Kylo Ren belatedly realizes that the roar isn't just the blood pounding in his ears, but the cry of the dragon unmuted by rot, by water, or time. The cross-guard lightsaber jumps into his hands, as he ignites the blazing blade. Then, he strikes the wall in furious slashes, painting it in broad strokes of sparks, and violence. There is a long, brutal scream that echoes through the grotto. He realizes, distantly, that it is coming from him. It's wrenched from him, his face warped and twisted in fury and grief. Each blow from his blade obscures his face from the rock, but it isn't good enough.   
  
It will never be good enough. 

*

Kylo Ren isn't sure how long it took him to wander out of the grotto and its subterranean lake. It is as though his body is on autopilot, his mind left drifting in the jagged planes of the grotto, of the mirror cave, seemingly forever. 

His lightsaber cylinder is back on his belt. Right now, he is sick of holding it, and doesn't want anything to do with it. Somewhere in the numbness, he placed his helmet back on, and retrieved his cloak, pulling the hood over his head. He also wants nothing to do with what lies beneath the visor for the moment. He walks for what seems ages. The Temple is still standing, a skeletal vigilant. For a few moments, he contemplates contacting his fleet and orbitally bombarding the entire surface of this planet: exterminating every Jedi vestige, every Caretaker, every Porg, every lifeform off its face forever. 

He doesn't do it. He doesn't feel anything anymore.   
  
Kylo Ren had come here looking for truths, to see what secrets Luke Skywalker hid to spread Jedi dogma through Rey and the entire Galaxy. He knows that there has been an awakening. He knows there are more Force-sensitive children out there, now, in the open. And something else ... something else is coming as well. Or perhaps, it was always there. Simply waiting. 

But Kylo Ren doesn't know about any of that. Briefly, he thinks about the children of the Galaxy. He remembers the Temple, and the children on the HoloNet that worshiped Luke Skywalker as their hero.   
  
And one child, one in the whole Galaxy, that never really knew him. 

Kylo Ren wonders how his face managed to get wet under the seals of his mask. And then, he decides instead to go back into his ship. He return to his fleet. To his Knights. To his First Order. To his Empire.   
  
None of this matters. He still has decisions to make. 


End file.
